Month: October 2005

The problem with some of the “new Web” applications isn’t the application itself but the business model. Build an incremental feature, create some buzz in the echo chamber, and then sit back and wait for GAMEY (Google / AOL / Microsoft / eBay / Yahoo) to buy your company.

I suspect we all have some ideas about features that could fall into this category. But what if instead of buyingyourcompany, the big web portals built the feature themselves? Where’s your sustainable business model?

Specifically, all these N-person shops trying to grab a share of the podcasting world who were at first competing with Apple’s iTunes and now with Yahoo Podcasts …

Spent a good hour this morning reading Mini-Microsoft, a recent phenom that’s actually been around a while. The comments are the interesting stuff. I don’t really care about the innards of Microsoft, but it’s making me think about how Yahoo works, including SDS and my own group.

Sheesh, blog spam is way up this past week. I moderate comments from all new commentators, so they aren’t posted until I approve them, but they do hit my mailbox. The increase is at least 10x what it used to be, although, fortunately I’m not seeing volumes like Ryan. There must be some new WordPress comment spam software in production. Like Ryan I’m not ready to introduce CAPTCHA.

Speaking of trends, I’m suddenly seeing the Three Letter Acronym “LMK” pop up in email and IM. This started about a few weeks ago. It’s not like I recently moved to a new team with their own lingo — this is from folks within my existing group, in other areas of the company, friends, and business contacts outside the company. It seems to be spreading like crazy. Wikipedia has had an entry for it since the spring. LMK if you’re only recently seeing it too, or perhaps I just haven’t been paying attention?

I can’t escape the observation that a simple idea, executed well, can not only change the world (or a part of it), but can also be satisfying in so many ways (like financially). Witness Yahoo!’s acquisition of Flickr, Konfabulator, and upcoming.org. How long until somebody snaps up Ning? How about the rock stars at 37signals?

The ideas at work here are around sharing, either via “Web 2.0” kinds of ideas, or communication/community (ala Y 360, but more focused). Having all these cool Web apps is great. Having them all share information among themselves is another.

Like any social movement, it starts with a small band of rebels/visionaries. By the time it hits the mainstream, it’s been transformed into something the initiators no longer recognize and don’t particularly want to be a part of. We’re probably not at that point yet with Web 2.0. Wait until there are truly compelling reasons to have web application interoperability, and watch malware writers look for weaknesses, while the hucksters build robots to use these interconnected apps for personal gain…

As web analytics professionals, we tend to focus on trends, distributions, segments, etc. But sometimes the best insights don’t come from numbers or fancy visualizations. They can come from the experience of a single visitor.